It’s election night, and the votes are rolling in and being counted. It’s all running smoothly — until someone opens a bag from a precinct and it all goes awry.

It’s not there — no memory pack holding the scanned paper vote results from that polling place, or no memory card holding the touch-screen vote numbers.

“If you talk to every single election official in the state, they all have a story of some poll worker — who just worked 12 or 14 hours — and he or she went home with something by accident,” said Dave Macdonald, Alameda County’s registrar of voters.

That’s why, last November, Alameda County became the first county in the state to institute a new level of security to verify the movement of the valuable memory cards and packs with a radio frequency identification program that tracks the items from precinct to return center to the registrar’s office in Oakland.

The new security feature works by poll workers collecting the memory cards and memory packs from the polling place’s scanning and touch-screen voting machines at the site before placing them in a tamper-proof bag with a seal. The cards and packs, which have radio frequency identification tags placed on them, then are dropped off at that precinct’s return center. Return center workers quickly scan the bag to make sure both the memory pack and card are inside the bag — as well as the paper voter index each voter signs in on — without opening the bag.

“It’s really another added level of security in the chain of custody,” Macdonald said. “We know, without breaking the seal of these bags, what’s in them, and where they’ve been.”

From the various return centers around the county, the bags then are taken to the registrar’s office, where they are scanned again to make sure all bags have their respective cards, packs and indexes.

Finally, the bags are open when the cards are ready to be uploaded into the computer and votes counted.

“I think it’s a big leap forward in terms of security, as well as speeding up the process of counting votes on election night,” said Macdonald, who as director of the county’s information technology department was familiar with radio frequency technology and thought it might be able to replace older, more antiquated accounting systems like bar codes.

Macdonald said the new system — which was developed in conjunction with Motorola and RFID Global Solution — saves election workers hours they normally would spend manually opening each bag and scanning the old bar codes.

The system has proved so efficient and helpful, Macdonald said, a couple other counties in the state have come to see if it could make sense for them.

“Right now, it’s hard to implement a lot of changes to your voting system when we’re in the midst of three elections in a relatively short period of time, but they do seem interested in the added speed and security it brings,” he said.

Jim March, a member of the board of directors for Black Box Voting, a national voting watchdog group, said Alameda County’s new security feature is interesting and could be helpful to ensure the integrity of the voting process.

“If done properly, the plan will help secure the chain of custody,” March said. He added, however, it does nothing to secure the actual ballots people use to vote.

“Someone’s trying to do something right,” he said, “but more can still be done.”

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